Virginia’s budget includes $3M to help Newport News-based Jefferson Lab bid for high-performance data facility

Virginia will give the Jefferson Lab $3 million to help the Newport News national laboratory bid for a major new Department of Energy project.

The project, a high-performance data facility, could have an enormous economic impact on the Peninsula, said state Sen. Monty Mason, D-Williamsburg, who pushed to add the money to the state budget for fiscal 2023. It will help the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility prepare detailed plans and engineering work to bid for the facility, Mason said.

“Just to give you an idea of the scale of Department of Energy work, Jeff Lab got something like $400 to $500 million of work from the electron-ion collider that New York got,” Mason said, referring to large project that the Virginia lab competed for but lost in 2020.

The Department of Energy wants to enhance its computing capability —50 times more computational science and data analytic application power than the department’s current supercomputers deliver.

The budget also includes $350,000 to help Hampton Roads universities, including the College of William & Mary, Christopher Newport University, Norfolk State University and Old Dominion University, develop roles in such a data facility.

Separately, the budget includes $2.5 million for a new Advanced Manufacturing Talent Investment Fund to help schools and universities develop and award 25,000 new kinds of advanced manufacturing credentials by 2042 — the kind of credentials Mason said employers like Newport News Shipbuilding have told him they’re looking for.

Dave Ress, 757-247-4535, dress@dailypress.com